Students as Open Educational Resources Co-Creators in the TalkTech Project

TalkTech 2022 is a co-creation educational project, an international virtual mobility that since 2008, involves the collaboration of students enrolled in a first-year introductory technology course at Bentley University in the United States with fourth-year multimedia students from Politehnica University of Timisoara in Romania. They work together to co-create virtual reality artifacts and in doing so, develop their digital literacy skills. While instructors create many open educational resources (OERs), in recent years, the TalkTech project encourages students to co-create and then share their digital artifacts as OERs so that others may learn from them. During the TalkTech project, every year, the students are part of an open virtual mobility, and using for this project the Open Virtual Mobility (OpenVM) Learning Hub and extra some digital tools. The main objective is to promote collaborative learning, connectivism social networking as an instructional method, OERs as the main content, open digital credentials as recognition, and validation of digital skills through co-creation of digital artifacts. All students from both universities have at least some prior experiences using mobile devices, synchronous and asynchronous communication tools, cloud storage, and search engines. Students select the tools they will use to interact with their partners and complete the project, using voice and video conferencing, email, texts, and file sharing tools. Their deliverable in the TalkTech2022 project is a combined VR scene that presents a local cultural artifact (a coffee house, church, sporting facility, museum) to their international partners. Students shared their final work products on the CoSpaces gallery, assigning them Creative Commons licenses, and in doing so, became creators of open educational resources.